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The Energy Blog is where all topics relating to The Energy Revolution are presented. Increasingly, expensive oil, coal and global warming are causing an energy revolution by requiring fossil fuels to be supplemented by alternative energy sources and by requiring changes in lifestyle. Please contact me with your comments and questions. Further Information about me can be found HERE.

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December 02, 2005

Subaru R1e Electric Car

EVWorldblogs had an update on the Subaru R1e electric car development, that I mentioned in my earlier post that it would have a 125 mile range. Treehugger reported that the car was 3.3 m (11-foot) long and that the battery lifespan is greater than 150,000 km.

Subaru is one of the first car makers to take advantage of the promising new developments in lithium ion batteries. They are teaming with NEC to use their fast charge batteries, for which there is very little technical information, except that they can be charged in five minutes to 90% of capacity and have a high energy density - sounds very similar to the A123 technology. All Bill More of EVWorldblog could say was that they could be as small as a briefcase, depending on the requirements of the vehicle.

The R1e is front wheel drive and has an AC permanent magnet motor with a maximum output of 40 kW. Subaru says that if they can develop a high efficiency, high performance and low cost battery, they believe the potential for the electric vehicle will grow since EV's have a simple structure and design. The battery can also be used in both the ICE and fuel cell hybrid electric vehicles. So they are focusing on the development of the battery technology. They have recently decided to develop 10 units as test vehicles for the Tokyo Electric Power Company for delivery by the end of March 2006. Timing for the U.S. market launch has not been determined.

I have come to believe that if a low cost EV with a range of 60-100 miles can be developed it will have a good niche market. As our concerns about energy use become greater a personal car like this could have a place, as a second or third car, in the suburbs for commuting and local trips. With a five minute charge the versatility is increased greatly. The primary car would then be a plug-in hybrid for longer trips.

Comments

I think you are right on the niche market comment. If it is low enough cost, it seems like many urban commuters would consider it as a second car. Keep the old gas guzzler in the garage for trips to grandma's for Thanksgiving and use the new EV for running to work and back.

And ideally, in the not-so-far-off future, we would see plug-in hybrids replacing the pure ICE car for longer trips although it seems like having a plug-in in the garage would take away a lot of the allure of buying a pure EV for commutes when you already get 20-30 miles (i.e. hopefully more than your round-trip commute) in electric mode from your plug-in. It will be interesting to see how the two compete or if one will boost acceptance of the other, etc.

I'm writing this on 19th Jan 06 as oil prices take another leap and Iran threatens to use its oil weapon (4th largest world supplier) if the West interferes with its nuclear plans.

Personally, I seriously object to giving the arabs any more petro-dollars because too many of them find their way to islamic fundamentalists who continue to try to kill as many of us as possible. It's just not good customer relations.

Then there is are issues of peak oil, global warming, etc.

It's also seriously time to stop burning oil in internal combustion engines. It's too precious a resource for that (plastics and lubricants, etc, etc)

Furthermore I don't like it that my government makes $14Bn p.a. from tax on oil imports of which only $2Bn goes back into road related funding.

I can now buy a 'SunBall' (see http://www.greenandgoldenergy.com.au). This is a highly efficient device which converts the sun's energy into electricity - much more efficient and less expensive than conventional solar panels.

I can install it on my roof and use it to generate free electricity that I can feed into the grid during the day and draw down at low off peak rates during the night to re-charge my EV.

Sorry for the long preamble, but perhaps it helps to explain my impatience to buy a Subaru R1e.

I suspect that there are many people in the world today who would share this point of view once they become aware of these two pieces of technology.

The next question is how do we persuade Subaru to make these vehicles available world wide? Any ideas?

Forget Hybrids..I dont want anything more to do with oil. The very thought of oil turns my stomach inside out. Oil is as corrupt as its color and should have gone extinct eons ago.
I would buy 5 of these cars! They are the sexiest car I have seen. If they become another auto parts hybrid then i will buy a vectrix in deffiance of the car companies.

It seems that with the R1E, we have come full circle. Early EVs, like the EV1, did not have the range (battery power) and eventually died. Hybrids, not only showed us the potential energy savings that computer control of the propulsion system blended with an electric motor and a battery could bring, but perhaps most importantly, created a large market for large format, highly effiecient batteries. Each generation of Honda and Toyota hybrids has featured better battery technology. Now everyone is on the hybrid bandwagon and the worldwide market for these batteries is huge. It was only a matter of time before the battery technology improved enough to power a vehicle by itself with enough range and acceleration that people would buy it. This is the future, generate electricity from the sun, wind, ocean, whatever, and charge higly efficient batteries. Forget fuel cells, these new batteries will be a more efficient "storage medium" than hydrogen. Hurry up R1E, I want one!

I would buy this electric car in a hearbeat!! I need it for my daily commute, and moreover, it is the solution to our geopolitical problems generated by our oil dependence. No pollution, no international complications and the possibility of free transportation using photovoltaic solar cells on our roofs. It's a win-win-win solution.

No need for electric cars unless you are want to clean up the environment. Oil is here to stay. Go to www.changingworldtech.com to see how it is made. Thermodepolymerization. Oil made using the Earth's own technology.

Well I wonder how long oil prices will remain above $70 a barrel. If peak oil production worldwide has already been achieved, then this will have an escalating impact on prices. However, if a politician even suggested reimposing the 55MPH speed limit he would not get reelected. We have had 32 years since the Arab Oil Embargo ended and what progress have we really made.

All of the sites on electric cars contain the same useless information. I know electric cars are the way to go.

So to cut to the chase, make these new electric cars as easy to obtain as gas-guzzlers or for us that are early adapter-wannabes, provide information on getting one. Not one web site that I've been to gives me a link or email to allow me to get onto a waiting list for a vehicle or findout how to obtain one! Why is that? If it is because I can not obtain one, then state that somewhere. Otherwise I see these sites as typical useless Internet garbage.

The first idea to generate more electricity for an electric car is to recapture the 'up and down motion' of the wheels and weight of the vehicle and convert that up and down force into electricity to help recharge the batteries. Possibly by using magnets connected to the shock absorbers. And also by having the weight of the body resting on and pulling up and down on a spiral, like the toy tops that you push down on to spin. It shouldn't be too hard to figure it out. Every time the vehicle or tires move up and down an electric charge could be generated. The electricity can be boosted by a rectifier and stored, or possibly used to spin a flywheel, or rewind a coil spring for later use.

I also had the idea of using a standardized battery pack for all electric vehicles that could be changed at gas stations as quickly as you pump gas. Instead of having to wait for a recharge the battery pack could be recharged at the gas stations. You would just pay for whatever electricity you used in the battery pack you exchange. A lightweight battery pack could make this possible and practicle. You could still recharge at home but most people don't park close enough to an outlet to do that so simply exchanging battery packs seems more practical for most people.

Joseph M. from Pasadena sez...
It was interesting to learn that the Hydrogen powered car is four times less efficient than the electric (battery powered) car. And that is becuase it takes four times the amount of electricity to produce Hydrogen, than if you were to put that same energy into batteries to power your electric car " that you will some day have the choice of buying ". The day will be nice when a car dealership or "independent company" will build an all electric car, priced under twenty thousand dollars, that can at least be driven around the city. Most of my driving is in my own city, It would be very practical for me to own an all electric City Car, that did not reqire any gasoline and I could recharge at home. I also read and heard about charging systems that will charge lead acid batteries in less than twenty minutes. the key is keeping the batteries cool, and not overcharging them. a sophistocated battery monitoring system is allready available(to charge the batteries withought overcharging, nor overheating) but quite costly. This system of rapid/ quik charging also gives a longer overal life to the batteries. thats why we need the automotive industry to incorporate this knowledge into the production of electric vehicles. I really think the electric cars of the future can only be brought here today by Silicon Valley, the Computer industry powerhouses. An electric car is basically a computer on wheels. We really need the thinking and discipline that the computer and electronics industry has. Maybe I will start my own Electric Car Company. It's like Pablo Picaso(The Artist, Painter), when asked why he started painting, he answered, " Because I didn't see anything I like ". So he started painting and created those works he could not find in the world. I have wanted an electric car my entire life. when I was a kid, I walked over to the exhaust pipe of my mothers car, The car was running and I felt air comming out of this pipe, I tried to breath that air and almost passed out. it was then, at the age of four or five years old, that I knew something was terribly wronge with this picture. It took me many years to learn what poison was, but even today I cannot understand how and why " We All " drive cars that take gasoline, that burns in our cars, and puts out an unbreathable poisonous gas, into our air, for all of us to breathe. This is very upsetting, very unsetleing, very sad. Were taking a vote, I need 90%.

Reason for Electric Cars Part Two:
I saw the movie " Who Killed the Electric Car " Very good movie. since then, I have been reading about electric cars. In a short time, I learned that electric vehicles are 80% energy eficient. where gasoline powered vehicles only put 20% of the energy to the wheels, forword motion. the gasoline powered car waste most of it's energy creating heat, not forward motion. and the electric car puts 80% of it's energy to the wheels. Do you need me to say that again? Also, electric motors only have one moving part, compare that to your ICE engine, Internal combustion engine, that reqires gasoline to create power, has several hundred parts that make it up. and most of those parts have a short life span. this is why you see gas powered motors only running 100,000 miles. One hundred thousand may sound like a lot of miles, but it's not when you compare that life to the one of the electric motor installed in the electric vehicle. now with this electricity powered car, you have a motor with one moving part, and the life is anywhere between 2,000,000 and 7,000,000 millon miles. thats right, two million to seven millon miles is how long your electric motor could last. That sounds pretty good to me. And yes, my next question was, Hey, but if we're pluging our cars in, wouldn't that just be re-directing the polution by way of making the energy plants work harder to create more electricity? and with reasearh, study and reading, it didn't take long to discover the multitude of information stateing that the electricity reqired to run the electric vehicle as compared to the gasoline powered vehicle, that electric car still run 97% cleaner than gas powered cars. Do you need me to say it again? and by the way, after learning that automobile manufactures make 40% of their profits from servicing the cars, I can also see why they would be very hesitant to put an electric vehicle on the road when it needs such minimal servicing. No more oil changes every three thousand miles, no more tune ups, oil filters, and hey, no more going to those stinky gas stations. the truth is, those gas stations smell bad. Even the newest cars still put out the tail pipe, a very poisonous gas, something none of us can breathe. Hey, what do you say we all educate ourselfs and do something about this? sounds good to me. Oh, and did I mention that 90% of people drive less than 50 miles per day. thats right, and that means that an electric car is perfect for 90% of americans, right now. maybe we should start telling the automotive industry what kind of cars we want to buy, rather than letting them tell us what we need. because what they're really saying is, Give us your money. Now I say, Give me an electric car! what do you say?

Watched a very interesting review on the G Wiz electric car last night. Tim Lovejoy from Channel 5’s Fifth Gear took to the streets of London to see if the £7,000 G Wiz was a practical enough vehicle. He found it wasn’t much use for taking the kids to school as it was a little on the small side for the children in the back but was adequate enough to get him self and his golf clubs in, so not too bad I suppose.

It is reckoned that the £7,000 price tag for the car will pay for its self within 1 year due to the car being exempt from the congestion charge, road tax, and can be parked for free in central London. The top speed of the car is just 40 mph and can travel for 40 miles on a single charge. In my eyes this is perfected for anyone living in the central of London.

This type of technology should be must be a concern of everyone. It is much cleaner and does considerable less damage to the environment Oil prices rose above $59 a barrel today 13/10/06 and it is predicted that it could rise as much as $100 per barrel.

The only disadvantage of owning an electric car is that they are usually quite slow; they cannot travel far due to the recharging aspect. Maybe we will see electric charging points in garages instead of fuel pumps. Even so I do think that people should be considering going all-electric in the future. J.C at Used Car Parts

The point that you are missing is that electric cars are NOT inherently slower than gasoline cars. James' comments imply electric cars are at a systemic disadvantage re: performance.

Incidentally, VERY few cars, gasoline or otherwise, can achieve 4 seconds to 60mph. I would call that pretty quick. And, when was the last time you travelled 130mph in a car? I would venture never. I know I haven't. Quickness is measured by acceleration, not top speed.

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I've been thinking a lot about electic and hybrid cars, and learned that they use brake heat to regenerate the battery?

I saw a flashlight infomercial on TV where you shake it, and you have the energy to turn it on. Why isn't that same kind of technology applied to the car's shocks? Driving down the highway or a dirt road will create a lot of bumping and shaking in the 4 shocks, can't that energy be transferred into electricicity to power the motor directly or to charge the battery? I'm sure I'm not the firt one to have thought of this, but I havent been able to find anything on it. Is there a reason why that kind of technology can't be used in cars like these?

Given enough interest and development by major manufacturers, I could see even F1 cars running on electricity in 10 years or less. The torque curves on electric motors make auto engineers salivate. Once the batteries are there, we will see transcontinental semis that are battery powered going 1000s miles per trip. Flywheel batteries have a similar energy density to gasoline, so storage space and weight is bound to go down.

They are making higher and higher capacity batteries, but they will never have the energy density of oil fuels. There is also no way to store pure hydrogen with the same low volume energy density that diesel has.

Since weight reduction is very important in aircraft, liquid hydrogen that weighs less than most fuels could be used especially for freight aircraft. The required insulating tanks remove much of the advantage. The capital cost of the tanks and the present high cost of hydrogen has left the Russian efforts in this direction the only large scale ones.

There should be no electric cars; They all should be serial hybrid. But you should have a big battery in the hybrid for plug-in charging. In a serial plug-in-hybrid, the engine can be made vanishingly small to the point of model aircraft engines.

Ten gallons of gasoline or diesel with a tiny 15% efficient engine will produce enough electricity to move a battery electric car 250 miles or more. The gasoline would weigh 60 pounds and the engine-generator ten pounds. Since it is not required to accelerate the car, the engine could be optimized to double the efficiency, or more, for a range of 500 miles. It can be a very simple engine with only one piston and very few moving parts because it does not have to give high starting or running torque. A super-small micro-turbine-generator with air bearings could even be used. High efficiency is not needed if the engine or turbine is rarely used.

Slow speed flywheels have a cost advantage over supercapacitors and batteries for high peak power.

Someone with a Tzero made a trailer that contained a small motorcycle engine-powered generator that was powerfull enough to run the car at full perfomance. This not only solved the problem of getting home but getting anywhere at the full performance of the car. It demonstated that a small engine could power a very high performance car. But even that is not needed, all that an electric car needs is the ability to get home from long distances at a reasonable speed because in todays traffic you are never guaranteed that you you will get a high speed. You may be rarely forced by a totally depleted battery to drive slower than you wish to, in traffic on a freeway, but you can just go to lunch.

The actual needed electricity to drive, stop and go, on city streets or freeway traffic jams could even be less than one horsepower, especially with regeneration at the stops and going downhill. Disney Park show cars have been refitted with motorcycle engines for low weight.

At the high efficiency of 20% for an automobile engine, a car that gets 50 miles per gallon while driving an average of 50 miles per hour is only producing about nine horsepower. All car makers should publish a table that shows what the horsepower is and what the fuel consumption is at different speeds on level roads with no winds.

Few would want to know that the 300 hp engine, that they paid for, never does produce that at the wheels, and seldom gets much above fifty horsepower.

At the published electricity consumption rate, 167 watt-hours per mile, and a rated speed of 60 mph, the Tzero is using about 13 horsepower from the batteries and motor. The money cost of doing this is less than two dollars an hour for most electric rates, and about six dollars an hour for a gasoline car that gets 30 miles per gallon.

Most people will never use the gasoline generator during a week, but like the small spare tire, its use is slow but it gets you home, but you never have to stop to change the engine-generator; The car computer just starts it. Because generators can be run at very high speeds, and engines and generators produce higher power at higher speeds with much less weight, only a small corner area is needed for the unit, and it can be replaced in minutes. It can be run while the owner is at work or play and very distant from an electical outlet. Many people are advocating such a car as an emergency power source, and some have been built with power inverters.

Steering pumps, water cooling pumps, fans and even air-conditioning compressors are more efficient if run from electricity. An electric air-conditioner pump mounted on the chassis could be permanently sealed for a life longer than that of the car with no repairs.

Concentrated solar energy and even coal can be used as an energy source to convert water and carbon dioxide into liquid fuels again; perhaps it would be methanol, diesel is also now being produced. Butanol would be the best gasoline compatable fuel with a long storage life. Such liquid fuel plants could be located near ordinary coal-fired power plants for a large source of carbon-dioxide and coal if necessary. Oil is now thirteen (13) times as expensive on a raw energy basis compared to coal with both delivered.

If solar energy concentrators were used, the reuse of carbon dioxide would eliminate the greenhouse effect of the synthetic diesel. If there were many plug-in hybrid cars on the road, it would always be more efficient to use any heat energy to charge the cars batteries, but liquid fuels are very valuable for some uses.

The currently operational nuclear power plants might even be used with high temperature heat pumps to raise the temperature of the reactor steam to a high enough level to conduct chemical reactions. Most reactors are run fully loaded, so there is not much excess heat.

It is easy to make a zero emissions locomotive powered by coal. No new technology is needed.

A three way engine-hydraulic-electric hybrid may give the best cost performance ratio because of the fact that hydraulic tanks and motors and controls are cheaper than electric ones for the same power. The linear free piston hydraulic pump, tested by Noax and others, eliminate even more parts and loses from a fuel powered engine pump. ..hg...

"Tesla Power" is a form of energy transmission technology that uses longitudinal EM waves instead of the more familiar transverse EM waves. You might want to familiarize yourself with the work of a fellow named Eric Dollard.

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The electric car battery low range is more myth than reality. After GM was allowed to stop production of the EV1 by the California Air Resources Board they sold the rights to the Ovitz battery to Chevron-Texaco. A company who would be sure to maximize its potential...like putting in the deep freeze and forgetting about it.
Now GM is pumping up its VOLT hybred vehicle due out in 2010, however their battery range is only 40 miles and it is their main focus of improvement to get it to market. It's been said many times before that GM talks a good game than fades out of the picture.
Back in 2002 a Chevron-Texaco press release touted, among other things, its Ovitz battery which it claimed had a range of 200 to 250 miles per charge in the GM EV1 which you charged in your own garage.
Wouldn't it seem logical that they would look over their shoulder at the past and consider that old technology. It is an assumption that they didn't, but they don't want to build electric cars anyway.
The Subaru R1e, mentioned above, has a range of 125 miles per charge and can be recharged to 90% in five minutes. Oh, did I mention that GM owns 10% of Subaru. Amazing how difficult it is to find old or new technology even when it is right under your nose.
Should Subaru pursue its R1e with fervor they will undoubtly sweep past GM who had a 10 year lead in electric car technology. Sounds like a conspiracy. Oh well, we can continue to count on GM for SUVs.
Although I have owned nine GM vehicles it doesn't appear there will be a tenth. Will I buy an R1e or like vehicle? Yes. Whoever is first.

We have developed a design of an almost perpetual car which runs on battery power for almost unlimited distance against present and future battery technologies. This technology can also convert present Hybrid automobiles to run thousands of miles without charging the batteries. Interested parties can contact us at GasAlternative@yahoo.com.

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